


Books

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: 12 monkeys theme week 2016, Other, Sort Of Fluff, Synchronicity, i miss the bookstore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 16:26:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7470825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>12 Monkeys Theme Week Day 2 - Theories</p><p>Hey look! And actual theory! Cassie finds herself at the bookshop in the 50s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Books

**Author's Note:**

> My challenge-fics are so short!

Cassie needed a break. They’d been in 1957 for three months and it had gotten them almost exactly nowhere, other than keeping standard hours for dull jobs at a factory. She decided to go for a drive, rather than for a drink; she might run into Cole if she went to the bar. She didn’t know how to treat him, now that she’d come all the way here to him--for him, yes, she had to admit that, but also for his mission, for the chance at hope and survival. She didn’t want to kill anymore.

Not even herself.

But he hadn’t pulled her into a hug when she arrived, and she hadn’t grabbed him like she half wanted to, and though it wasn’t as awkward as it had been in their early days, it was awkward enough. She found herself being mean to him, and hated both that she did it and that he took it. She hated that he looked at her with that face and those eyes and she could see what he was looking at her for, but she couldn’t give it to him. Not when the mission was still looming over them and time was passing too quickly.

Her drive went hours long; she found herself in her old neighborhood for the first time since her bookshop had exploded sixty years in the future. And then she found herself pulling up in front of the door, parking the car, holding onto the steering wheel, unsure what to do next.

“Cassandra?” someone said through the open window, “Cassie?” She looked up and saw Agent Gale ducking his head down and bending almost double from his tall height to see in the window, holding a bag of donuts and a coffee. “I thought that was you! Is Cole around?”

He was a little older than before, but not so old as the last time she’d seen him in the 60s. She snapped off the thought of what had happened to him then.

“No--Cole’s in New York. Working.”

“You looking for me?”

She finally got her brain moving, and got out of the car; Gale held the door for her. The man talked like a sailor, but his manners were charmingly old fashioned.

“No, I didn’t know you were here. I was looking for the bookstore.” She waved a gloved hand at the painfully familiar front windows. The lights were on inside, the papers that had always been there in her lifetime not yet on the glass. There were people.

“It’s great, isn’t it. Belongs to my kid and his wife.”

“What?”

“Sure. We’re not a whole family of feds. What fun would that be? Come on, I’ll show you around. Introduce you.”

Time travel had given her a lot of surreal experiences, but this one was by far the top of the list. Gale chatted as if they’d known each other all their lives, carefully avoiding the topics she could tell he really wanted to talk about but was smart enough to not mention in public, and then she was inside the shop and she’d stopped listening.

Everything was how it had always been since she was a kid, but also so different. It was all new and shiny for one, not dinged up. Not faded. It had been closed up for decades by the time she moved into it when Cole needed her help and a safe place to live when he was here, and she’d never managed to get all the dust out; here, there had never been dust. It hadn’t happened yet.

“Cassie, come meet my daughter-in-law.”

Her grandmother. Young and fresh, with a strange side-eye at her weird dad that Cassie knew she’d never talk to again in only a few years. Her mother must be a baby now. Or not even a baby. She suddenly had a lot of trouble figuring out her own timeline, and the woman was smiling at her and holding out a hand, and Cassie realized that they’d just been formally introduced and she was starting to think her dad’s friend was weird.

“Hello. I’m Cassie.”

“Lovely name! Dad says you’re a colleague?”

Cassie put on her most dazzling I’m-totally-a-time-native smile, the one she used on her bosses at the factory, and said “Oh, hardly a colleague! I’m just from the typing pool. I was looking for a book and ran into Agent Gale on the street.”

“You’re not a spy then?”

“Sweetheart…”

“I’m just joshin’ you dad! Lighten up!” Then she linked her arm with Cassie’s and leaned in conspiratorially, “I know he’s not a spy, but it’s so much more fun to pretend he is.” She led Cassie around the shop, showing off the various sections, pointing out books she liked, chatting amiably. When her skin touched Cassie’s there was a weird tingle, not like a paradox-pain, but maybe something similar. She didn’t seem to notice.

She wasn’t out of her time.

“We can get you almost any book you need,” she said. “We’re real popular with obscure history buffs and college kids studying weird stuff.”

Cassie’s sense of fate, that she generally ignored because she wasn’t comfortable going through the motions of someone else’s plan, flared up at that, and she knew that this is why she’d driven all the way here, and found herself in this particular place. 

“Can you get me any books on the ancient Druze culture?” she asked, and smiled her big smile, and suddenly felt a hell of a lot more positive about their mission.


End file.
